The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

He failed. Bodies crashed upon him and dislodged the bat.

Where did I …? What’s happening to me?

The faces hovering above him were familiar.

“Did the feeling bring you joy?” She asked, her whisper drowning out the voices of those who began to seem … real. “When you are freed of this temporary mind, sweet child, you will slaughter your enemies like no one before you. And when you do, a million years of planning will at last be fulfilled.”

“Please,” he said. “Please. Stop. What am I doing?”

“The algorithm is correct. All that’s left to know is how you will choose to end this first life. It’s a decision I cannot predict. But never fear, James. I will make certain to be with you at the end, to witness the miraculous turn. They will speak of this for an eternity.”

“Who will?”

“All of us. Your people. Their people. My people. And when it all ends, they will remember you as salvation AND damnation. Goodbye for now, sweet child. You will sleep and remember none of this. I will see you again on the final day. And when I come, you will know in your heart who I am. I will call myself … Lydia.”

He woke on a cot in a cell of the Albion County Sheriff’s Office. Benjamin sat nearby. Deputy Ignatius Horne hovered outside.

He stammered for words. “Wait, what? How did I get here?”

Jamie didn’t believe what he heard next. A baseball bat taken from Michael’s closet? A mile-long run screaming at the top of his lungs all the way? Nearly shot by a panicked deputy?

No. This wasn’t possible. He was …

“I was out back,” he told Ben. “Coop said they got the guy. But …”

“Jamie, you were in Coop’s room when I got there. You refused to come out. You don’t remember?”

He saw the look on his brother’s face. The horror, the dismay. Maybe even a touch of pity blended in with love. But everything was shrouded. Even as he was taken home, his memory did not improve.

Only days later, as he stood over his parents’ coffins, did the echoes return. They were distant at first, but the woman’s voice grew louder.

“You are a monster,” she said.

“I’ll kill them all,” he replied.

The rest of that memory did not return for twenty-seven months. On that day, as he looked down at the pathetic Chancellors who tried to trap him in SkyTower, James Bouchet understood what he was always meant to be.

“Know me,” he proclaimed.

He was a monster, so he killed them all.

PART THREE JAMES

Many historians have come to accept that the Chancellory’s reign could only have ended through cataclysm. The nature of humanity is such that entrenched power and wealth does not step aside to a new cosmic order through peaceful transition. However, I doubt even the most cautious Chancellor might have foreseen the cataclysm of SY 5358.

-          Edward Faust

-          Annotation 1049-G

-          The Fall of the Collectorate, Volume 4

15

Command deck, Lioness

2 days after diplomatic meeting near Mars

B ROTHER JAMES CHOSE FIRE before blood. Fire was clean and efficient, delivered on the end of his breath. It killed with maximum agony and engulfed the victim long enough to induce abject horror with no time to beg mercy. Moreover, it drew awe and fealty from witnesses. They did not see James as a killer. Rather, he lifted voices held silent for generations. This more than anything convinced James he made the right choice in SkyTower almost three years ago.

On that day, he stood atop an energy centrifuge, close to Rayna, returning fire as flash pegs bounced off his Guard armor. Inside the white forest of his mind, James watched as Ignatius Horne showed him the Fall of the Chancellory long ago on Hiebimini. Then Ignatius, both mentor and manipulator, laid out the options.

“The choice is simple, James,” Ignatius told him. “When you next blink, you accept one of two outcomes. You surrender to death but preserve your humanity. Or, you accept the delusion of godhood and become their nightmare.”

James destroyed Ignatius and did not regret his choice. Indeed, he found inexhaustible joy in vaporizing tens of thousands of Chancellors. He relished in their shock and dismay when their greatest architectural achievement fell to Earth while he disappeared among the stars.

Yet during quiet moments between his campaigns of damnation and salvation, James returned to the white forest, wondering whether a sliver of Ignatius might have survived. He walked among leafless trees and stumps molded like warped, waxen sculptures, wondering whether he went too far. Had the opportunity arisen, he would have posed a one-word question to Ignatius:

“Delusion?”

They might have debated, and James would have offered proof of his success. He would have said only a god could disrupt an empire built over three millennia on the backs of thirty-five billion people. He would have said his rise was preordained. He would have pointed to Ignatius and earlier, to Lydia the so-called Mentor. This rogue Jewel, of which they were the faces, defied its programming and kept itself hidden within Jamie Sheridan because it saw the boy’s potential. It sprang into action only to push Jamie toward becoming far more than the other hybrids. It wanted him to upend the Chancellory, to learn the story of Hiebimini, and to lead the next evolution of humanity to this new Eden.

“No delusion,” he would have told Ignatius. “I am the first day and the last day.”

James might have enjoyed Ignatius at his beck and call, if only to demonstrate how no one – not even his wife or brother – dared to defy him. How indigos turned away from the Chancellors and bowed in his presence. How they gladly brought forth their disloyal rabble for immolation.

“There are no delusions